A TV meet-up between Sterling and his Chelsea abuser would be a game-changer for anti-racism movement in UK
FOR Manchester City, Chelsea and for Raheem Sterling, the England star’s £45million transfer is a good bit of business all round.
City get a good chunk of change, Chelsea get a proven winner, and the player gets a move back to his home city and the chance to play for a club where he’s a little bit more the main man than he was at his last one.
There are similarities between Sadio Mane’s decision to quit Liverpool for Bayern Munich and the move Sterling is making.
In so much as I don’t get the feeling Sterling feels he has been as appreciated at City as perhaps he could have been.
Kevin De Bruyne will be the main man at the Etihad while ever he is there.
And I just wonder if the arrivals this summer of Erling Haaland and Jack Grealish last summer, great players that they are, have signalled to Sterling that City are perhaps starting to take more of a galactico approach to their transfer policy than they have in years gone by.
Opportunity
Sterling is a player who goes about his business quietly.
Whatever his reason to leave, Stamford Bridge is an interesting destination for the 27-year-old – not least given it was there he was allegedly racially abused by supporter Colin Wing during City’s visit in 2018.
I’d imagine Sterling thought, ‘Well, that was just one person out of 40,000-odd’, when Chelsea came knocking – and I’m confident every black player would have felt the same.
The fact he is going there presents the Blues with a fantastic opportunity to make a huge anti-racism statement, and I’d love to see the club and the player take it.
They could sit Wing down with Sterling, if they are both amenable to it, and have them discuss on camera everything that happened that day.
Sterling could tell him how the events made him feel, how they made his family feel, the impact racist language, perceived or real, can have.
And, of course, it would be lovely to see Wing squirm a little if he did indeed say what he is alleged to have said.
But if he makes a sincere apology and it is obvious he is remorseful for his actions that day, and if Sterling accepts the apology, then perhaps Chelsea could say, ‘OK, you were a season-ticket holder for a good number of years. Your record was squeaky clean at the club until the City game, so you can now go back on the waiting list for a ticket again’.
“Sometimes, just taking away a season ticket and banning someone for life from something will succeed only in making them bitter and won’t necessarily change opinions.
But being part of them getting their season ticket back probably would.
Powerful
Sterling has spoken well on racism and he is clever enough to know such a video would shake the foundations of a lot of these anti-racism organisations, which say a lot but do very little. It would provide powerful imagery of a man saying how sorry he is for what he has done, that he knows the damage his actions caused and that, as a Chelsea supporter, he now welcomes Sterling to his club.
And imagine that going around the world – boom! We’re addressing racism rather than just talking about addressing it.
Chelsea have had problems with racist behaviour from some of their fans, from Paul Canoville, the club’s first black player, being targeted by his own supporters to the Paris Metro incident in 2015 and, again in 2018, anti-semitic chants. I would say 95 percent of Chelsea fans, perhaps even 99 percent of them, aren’t racist and, under Roman Abramovich and Bruce Buck, much was done to combat the issues the club have had.
One of the smartest moves Chelsea made was in appointing Canoville as an ambassador.
He has been able to walk on the pitch and round the stands, shaking hands with supporters, and, one person at a time, change opinions. Maybe Sterling can do that, too.
Sterling is clever enough to know that such a video would shake the foundations of a lot of these anti-racism organisations which say a lot but do very little
summer on pre-season tours when, post-covid, a series of round robin tournaments across the country could Middlesbrough, Darlington and York could have played in one, Manchester United could have been in a group with
wonders but, as ever, the ‘greed is good’ mantra won out as the big clubs fly away for lucrative engagements.